Rachel Tippograph (2:56)

Sarah, have you been a part of any rebranding initiatives?

Sarah Hofstadter (2:59)

I feel like this is like the biggest layoff because Profitero recently went through a rebrand. Oh, I don't think you even meant to go there, but we did a rebrand earlier this year to Profitera plus and you might think that's not a big deal, but the elements of style that go into something like that and what you're trying to communicate with that. We could have changed the name, we could have just said profitero 2.0. But profitero plus was really meant to be a major rebrand to expand into services. So it's not just data and tech, but it's more so that you can not just get the analytics, but actually the action that goes along with it. What goes on behind the scenes in order to make something like that happen is so much more than anybody would ever consider. But part of it is when you rebrand, how you don't lose the goodness of what you have while still highlighting that something has changed. We've seen good and bad. How about you?

Rachel Tippograph (3:58)

Yeah, I had to clean up a bad one. Gap hired me after they changed the logo in 2010. America was, I would say, disgusted, non pleased. Yeah. And then they changed it back pretty fast.

Megan Frank (4:12)

Yeah.

Sarah Hofstadter (4:12)

As somebody who like just bought a whole bunch of baby clothes, have like five great nieces and nephews, and I literally was just buying like old school baby Gap sweatshirts with old school logo. Like you don't mess with that. But what needs to be true for somebody to rebrand if the company made.

Rachel Tippograph (4:30)

Some pretty unforgivable mistakes where they really need an identity change would be a, a reason to rebrand.

Sarah Hofstadter (4:40)

So are you hiding or like what's the impetus for it? I mean, Jaguar, what do you think? Love it or hate it?

Rachel Tippograph (4:49)

I think that they took away some classic heritage that absolutely signaled like status and luxury and made it feel like a modern day middle price point car. So I just don't understand why they did that.

Sarah Hofstadter (5:05)

That's why they did it and what they did. Right. And certain brands are untouchable.

Rachel Tippograph (5:11)

I would put that in that category. But I think as a marketer, especially if you're entering a multi generational company or a company that's been around 100 plus years, like there's a reason why that company has stood the test of time and it has a lot to do with brand. And so I understand when you want to make tweaks, like how McDonald's made tweaks to the arch, but it didn't throw away the arch.

Sarah Hofstadter (5:35)

That's an evolution.

Rachel Tippograph (5:36)

Correct? I'm supportive of evolutions. I personally think I'm less supportive of rebrands.

Sarah Hofstadter (5:42)

They've got to be really carefully considered, let's just say.

Megan Frank (5:45)

Yeah.

Rachel Tippograph (5:46)

Well, we're about to bring Megan onto the show, who has some very strong opinions around the do's and don'ts of modernizing legacy brands. So let's bring Meghan onto the show today. We are very excited to have Megan Frank, the SVP of marketing and R and D@Misscan and a longtime pal of Sarah and I.

Megan Frank (6:08)

Hey Megan. Hey. Great to be here. I'm an avid Brave Commerce listener. So excited to be on the other side of the table. Thanks for having me.

Rachel Tippograph (6:16)

It was about time. And so before we get into everything, Myscan has a lot of well known brands within the portfolio, but the Mizcan name might be less familiar with folks. So what are some of the brands that exist within your portfolio?

Megan Frank (6:32)

Great question, Rachel. As you said, I'm assuming many Brave Commerce listeners aren't familiar with the Mizcan name but will be familiar with many of our brands. So just taking a step back. The Mizcon Group was founded in Honda, Japan in 1804. We celebrated our 220th anniversary last year, but it was just about 10 years ago that the company expanded their footprint in the US with the acquisition of Ragu and Bertolli brands. We also have a number of vinegars and cooking wines, including Follent House, Nakano and the Mizcan brand. And we do all the sales, marketing and distribution of Angostura bitters in North America. And then hot off the presses, we just recently acquired, as of last week, the Zing Zang brand, which for those who are not familiar is the number one Bloody Mary mix in the US So this helps expand our presence in the growing mixology segment. So a diverse and exciting portfolio of brands.

Rachel Tippograph (7:24)

So I recently just saw that headline. It's so interesting. The mixer space is getting traction with the alcohol portfolio companies and now the non alcohol portfolio companies. What do you think that signals about what's happening right now?

Megan Frank (7:39)

Many of the lines are blurring, right? And for us it was kind of this blurring of lines between cocktails and mocktails. Obviously there's a lot of synergies with Bloody Marys and what we do in pasta sauce. We already have the route to market established for Angostura bidders, so the acquisition made a ton of sense for us. And Zing Zang is obviously a legacy brand that's well positioned to take advantage of some of these growing consumer trends.

Sarah Hofstadter (8:02)

One of the nice things, first of all, I've got niscan products all over my house, except for I go with non kosher. But a lot of these brands have been around for like more than 100 years. Particularly, I mean, I'm a huge fan of the rice vinegars. So when you think about something like that, those brands have been around forever. What makes that stand the test of time?

Megan Frank (8:22)

Yeah, no, great question. We do have a number of legacy brands. The majority of our brands in our portfolio are brands over a hundred years old. So building a brand that endures for decades, or in this case even centuries, requires a blend of the timeless fundamentals and then more timely adaptive strategies to ensure that we're continuing to drive relevance with today's consumer and culture. So the timeless foundations of brand equity should remain unchanged. So that's the brand's positioning, right? What the brand stands for in the hearts and minds of consumers and a brand's visual identity. So the distinctive assets, this can be a brand's logo. So think of, you know, the McDonald's golden arches, audio, mnemonic colors, slogan, etc. So these things should remain unchanged. Consistency in these brand elements help build mental availability and salience, driving brand association. How and where you bring these branding elements to life change over time based on what's happening with the consumer and the cultural conversation. So this would be creative platform and messaging activation channels, your retail and e commerce experience, these all evolve with culture. Innovation is also another great way to keep a brand modern and relevant. Ragu's a great example of how we've combined the timeless with the timely aspects of brand building to drive relevance with today's consumer. Ragu is an 88 year old brand. We're deliberate to stay true to what the brand stands for, which is bringing families together based on our unbeatable value and mealtime convenience. We also consistently use the Ragu yellow lid as a beacon of the brand. And so you'll see yellow across our visual identity very consistently. Yet we drive relevance to recruit that next generation of Ragu consumer by evolving how and where we show up based on the cultural conversation. So a recent example of this that I'll give is a collaboration we did with Hot Ones. Hot Ones is the number one show on YouTube and it's especially popular with millennials and Gen Z. For those who aren't familiar, it's a talk show format and celebrity guests come on and are interviewed while eating progressively hotter and hotter wings to the point of actually Shaq having tears running down his face as he's eating super hot wings and chugging a gallon of milk. So we developed a limited edition co branded Ragu Hot Ones heat pack which was a three pack of progressively hotter sauces. We launched it around the tailgating occasion, had 360 support and this LTO sold out on Amazon in a day.

Rachel Tippograph (10:50)

Wow. That show is ridiculous.

Megan Frank (10:52)

It's crazy.

Rachel Tippograph (10:54)

I'm like wow. Like humans, we're so easily entertained.

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Megan Frank (12:08)

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Rachel Tippograph (12:45)

So I have a question based on everything that you just expressed and this is outside of Mizcad, when you look at companies that do change their logo that have really rich history. So the one that comes to mind this year, totally outside your category, Jaguar. What do you think goes on behind these closed doors when executives are working at a heritage brand and make the decision to like make massive changes to.

Sarah Hofstadter (13:10)

The logo, I think it's a lot.

Megan Frank (13:12)

Of conversations we have internally. When you have legacy brands, it is very challenging to continually remain relevant to that next generation of consumer. And so I think in the spirit of trying to reinvent the brand and stay relevant, sometimes brands lose the DNA and what actually brought the brand to where it is today. So it's a fine balance of what do you remain the same to keep the nostalgia and the core equity and DNA of a brand and what do you evolve to continually drive relevance over time? Yeah.

Rachel Tippograph (13:45)

And then, you know, on that note of trying to bring in the next generation of consumers into whatever category you might be selling, I think it's interesting and you talked about this in your opening about Ms. Can's history. It's a family owned business. We've had a lot of family owned businesses on this show. Often they're in the confectionery space. What we always hear is how those businesses think in legacy as opposed to quarters, and there's a lot of benefits around that. But when you're running marketing, or in your case marketing and R and D and you got to move fast, how do you get employees to move fast when the culture might be so oriented towards the long term?

Megan Frank (14:24)

This is an interesting and frankly challenging dynamic to manage. So as I mentioned earlier, Nizcon is a now 221 year old 9th generation family owned company. So the 9th generation of the founding Nakano family still own and run the company today. So they're definitely in it for the long game and definitely thinking in terms of legacy. That said, the benefit of a smaller family owned company is it is easier in many ways to move quickly and take risks because there's less bureaucracy than larger publicly traded organizations. The key to moving quickly for us is one building a culture of ownership and accountability where the team feels empowered at all levels to drive decision making. This also creates a more engaged and motivated team because people feel like they actually have the authority to make decisions. It's also critical to have a clear long term vision and bring people along in the journey. So at Mizcan, we use the OGSM framework for those who aren't familiar. It stands for objectives, goals, strategies and measures. And this allows us to connect that very long term aspirational vision and ambition to short term actions. So it ensures everyone across functions and levels is rowing in the same direction and knows where they sit and their role in addressing that long term and delivering on that long term vision. It also creates clarity and expectations in what success looks like. And then finally, one last point. We build agility into how the team works. So the majority of our investments today are flexible. We're consistently evaluating the performance of our plans and our investments and optimizing on a quarterly basis. And then we set aside agility dollars for test and learn and experimentation. A couple examples of this recently, like many companies, we're exploring AI. We've used these agility dollars to explore different AI use cases. We've also experimented with different search strategies. So does always on search provide a higher return than day parting? And then do we do quite a bit of AB testing on content and creative to see which version of the creative works harder for us?

Sarah Hofstadter (16:32)

You know, it's interesting, you've said the word legacy twice. If I had to do like a word cloud of this episode thus far, legacy, you'd also be talking about agility. And usually those two are at odds with each other. A lot of that has to do with culture. I mean, you talk about being a family owned business, not being reliant on quarterly earnings and public bureaucracy and all that other fun stuff, but so much of this is culture. And you're based in the US Companies, Japanese. How do you recognize how to balance those realities culturally as well as what's the kind of culture you try to create within your four walls or virtual walls in order to get that responsibility and accountability of these prestige brands that have been around for so long with the flexibility that you kind of need to have in the way you just said.

Megan Frank (17:23)

Excellent question, Sarah. So one, I think it's making sure that employees coming in are super clear on MSCON's value proposition. Because you've alluded to this. It's very unique. Both the size of our company, the fact that we're family owned, ninth generation, our portfolio brands. In many ways we have a really unique value proposition. So when folks come in, they're very clear on that and they're proud to be part of the Midscon family. And then I think it's some of the other ideals and values that I've alluded to where it's really about building a culture of empowerment, making sure that the team is very clear on the vision and where we're trying to go and they see their role in that. And then building a culture of agility because I think particularly in a marketing role and how quickly today's world is evolving, building that culture where people feel like they can come in and take risks and experiment is for Many marketing professionals today, very empowering and invigorating.

Rachel Tippograph (18:16)

I'm just curious about the results from the search experiment you guys did.

Megan Frank (18:21)

Yes, it's a great question. So some of it is still work in progress and transparency. It's something we're doing in partnership with the Walmart Connect team, but given. So a lot of it has to do with obviously our investment profile and, and what we can invest where. But for us, day parting has shown to have a much stronger roi. We found that we were tapping out on spending like midday and so we weren't getting the return we needed on search. So for us, we're pivoting in many cases to a day parting strategy.

Rachel Tippograph (18:50)

Interesting. I'm sure you saw the headline in the last month, but Bose completely turned off search and it didn't impact sales. So it's interesting to see how people are playing around. So we talked about people, we talked about culture, but there is a whole other side of your business which is the distribution side, your customer, retail partners. How do you make sure that you can hold them accountable the same way that you're holding your employees accountable to meet the needs of the business?

Megan Frank (19:18)

I'm glad you asked this because this is an area we've spent a lot of time focusing on and made a lot of progress. It is true, the cost to compete as a brand manufacturer has never been higher. That's why it's critical to treat retailers not just as customers, but as strategic partners. And this means really clear mutual accountability. So as part of the GBP discussions, we sit down with all of our key customers and clearly articulate by portfolio and by brand what are our objectives. So is the primary objective to drive penetration, increase market share, retain existing consumers or drive innovation? And then from there we hold partners accountable by bringing data and value to the table. This includes in every case showing the role our brands play in driving incremental category growth. Because as we know, this is top of mind for every merchant today, particularly in a world where volume driving top line growth is really challenging for most CPG organizations. We've developed a custom, always on integrated measurement model that determines the efficiency and effectiveness across every retailer and every media channel. So traditional media as well as retail media, and we leverage this data with retailers on a regular basis to influence JBP planning, help us determine and optimize the allocation of spend across both retailers and tactics. Data for us is the great arbiter. So it's important that we have strong, credible data and insights in addition to fast feedback loops so that we can evolve very quickly as the landscape evolves. And then the last thing I'll say on this is putting ownership back on the retailers has been a game changer for us as it sparked these productive JBP discussions as I alluded to. And it sort of shifted the focus from a constant push on increased funding, right, the need for increased funding to results based investments. So this not only strengthens our partnerships, but also ensures that both properties are working towards shared goals.

Sarah Hofstadter (21:22)

Well, let's pick on that one for a moment because in order to do that, you've got to have groups that have not historically necessarily, especially given the length of the company's history, but also just Food and Bev in general. Those are kind of like almost like parallel teams that have been working in similar spaces, but not necessarily in as strong a partnership as might be needed for the things you just talked about like joint retailer jdps that include all the different components to it. How have you designed the team in order to be able to make the commercial marketing ecosystem work for both the needs of consumers, shoppers and the retailers themselves? And like you talked about media and you talked about like the agility of media in that how do you think about the national retail media continuum in that vein?

Megan Frank (22:09)

I joined Midscon in February 2020, which was basically like a week before COVID hit. And as we all know, this was the catalyst for E commerce and online shopping to surge dramatically. So one of the first things I looked at is what's the optimal org design based on the work, the capabilities we needed to very quickly build the size of our organization and our desire to build this seamless consumer experience end to end deliberately looked at org design agnostic of people. So at Mizcan we have two business units right now we have meal solutions and flavor enhancers based on our portfolio of brands within marketing we have multiple coes that support these business units. Those include Insights and Analytics, Innovation, Commercialization and Connected Commerce. We put all media to shelf responsibilities under the Connected Commerce team. So Sarah, to your question, this includes traditional media, retail media and shopper marketing. It's important to note we also consolidated all of these responsibilities under a single agency so historically was sitting under multiple agencies. We put all these responsibilities under one team in one agency which has allowed us to develop more seamless integrated plans and operate with greater agility. The structure also ensures that we're driving demand all the way from awareness to conversion without silos. So every touchpoint, whether it's tv, digital, ad, in store activation, works together to reinforce the brand message and influence purchase. And it also allows us to drive that feedback loop I talked about. Right. And faster optimization. So if we find out that a campaign isn't converting in retail media, we can very quickly shift those dollars to traditional media tactics, basically in real time.

Rachel Tippograph (23:51)

It's amazing how you guys were ahead of the curve when you decided to make all these organizational changes. How did your commercial sales team feel?

Megan Frank (23:59)

For us, we had none of these capabilities. So it wasn't, it was, hey, we need to build these capabilities. It wasn't a huge structural change for the organization. So I think in ways, Rachel, that made it a little bit easier. But I think like any paradigm shift or change your new capabilities, it was about being really transparent up front on the longer term vision, what we needed to do this and where this fit into our larger 5, 10 year growth ambition for the company. So everyone saw what was in it for them and for the company as a whole.

Rachel Tippograph (24:33)

Good exercise in change management. Well, Megan, we gotta ask you our famous last question, which is, what's the bravest thing you've ever done?

Megan Frank (24:42)

Great. Well, I obviously knew this question was coming, so I've spent some time thinking about it and I think one of the bravest things I've ever done was accepting a job leading Jim Beam globally. When I was a few months into my pregnancy with my daughter, I was reluctant given global roles oftentimes come with insane travel, crazy hours, et cetera. The key for me was clearly defining upfront what the boundaries were. And I was super fortunate in this case to have a really supportive manager and leadership who really not only respected but protected those boundaries that I had set. And this became a defining role for me in my career. And probably worth noting that my daughter doesn't remember any of it today.

Rachel Tippograph (25:23)

Oh man, I love that story and I'm sure your daughter was proud of you. And it's amazing to recognize that you can speak up and have people honor and support your wishes. Thank you, Megan, for sharing the Ms. Can story we will be following, especially with the new acquisition and catch you on the other side.

Megan Frank (25:42)

Thank you, Rachel and Sarah, appreciate you having me.

Rachel Tippograph (25:46)

If you like what you heard and you want to keep exploring Ms. Can's rich history, go check out an episode we did with Diego Palmieri about a year ago. If you like what you heard, tell a friend, write a review. Thanks for listening.

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